Lifeboat Foundation

To generate swarms of new viral particles, a virus hijacks a cell into producing masses of self-assembling cages that are then loaded with the genetic blueprint for the next infection. But the picture of how that DNA is loaded into those viral cages, or capsids, was blurry, especially for two of the most common types of DNA virus on earth, bacterial viruses and human herpesvirus. Jefferson researchers pieced together the three-dimensional atomic structure of a doughnut-shaped protein that acts like a door or ‘portal’ for the DNA to get in and out of the capsid, and have now discovered that this protein begins to transform its structure when it comes into contact with DNA. Their work published in Nature Communications.

“Researchers thought that the portal protein acts as an inert passageway for DNA,” says senior author Gino Cingolani, Ph.D., a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Thomas Jefferson University and researcher at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center. “We have shown that the portal is much more like a sensor that essentially helps measure out an appropriate length of DNA for each capsid particle, ensuring faithful production of new viral particles.”

The finding solves a longstanding puzzle in the field, and reveals a potential drug target for one of the most common human viral pathogens, herpesviruses, which is responsible for diseases such as chicken pox, mononucleosis, lymphomas and Kaposi sarcoma.

Agree; math is a must. However, experimentation is when the rubber meets the road.

In the mid-1990s, I studied mathematics. I wasn’t really sure just what I wanted to do with my life, but I was awed by the power of mathematics to describe the natural world. After classes on differential geometry and Lie algebras, I attended a seminar series offered by the math department about the greatest problem in fundamental physics: how to quantize gravity and thereby bring all the forces of nature under one theoretical umbrella. The seminars focused on a new approach pioneered by Abhay Ashtekhar at Penn State University. It wasn’t research I had previously encountered, and I came away with the impression that the problem had been solved; the news just hadn’t yet spread.

It seemed a clear victory for pure thought. The requirement of mathematical consistency also led, for example, to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Without the Higgs, the Standard Model of particle physics would stop working for particles that are collided at energies above 1 teraelectron-volts, well within the range of the Large Hadron Collider. Probabilities would no longer add to 100 percent and would cease to make mathematical sense. Something new thus had to turn up once that energy was crossed. The Higgs was the simplest possibility that physicists could think of—and, sure enough, they found it.

Continue reading “What Quantum Gravity Needs Is More Experiments” »

Nuclear fusion is premised on building technology that would replicate the reaction that naturally powers our Sun — two light atoms, in this case, hydrogen, are fused together under extreme temperatures to produce another element, helium.

The process would release vast amounts of clean energy drawn from an almost limitless fuel source, with nearly zero carbon emissions.

However, it has yet to be done on a scale that would make it usable. Canadian scientists are hoping to change that, announcing plans to harness and develop nuclear fusion technology so they can deliver a working nuclear fusion plant prototype by 2030.

Continue reading “Scientists Have a Plan to Replace Fossil Fuels With Nuclear Fusion by 2030” »

Nice.

When you think of diamonds, rings and anniversaries generally come to mind. But one day, the first thing that will come to mind may be bone surgery. By carefully designing modified diamonds at the nano-scale level, a Missouri University of Science and Technology researcher hopes to create multifunctional diamond-based materials for applications ranging from advanced composites to drug delivery platforms and biomedical imaging agents.

Dr. Vadym Mochalin, an associate professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at Missouri S&T, is characterizing and modifying 5-nanometer nanodiamond particles produced from expired military grade explosives so that they can be developed to perform specific tasks. His current research studies their use as a filler in various types of composites.

Continue reading “Missouri S&T researcher works to develop nanodiamond materials” »

Nice read.

The results demonstrate that the positions of tens of thousands of atoms can be precisely identified and then fed into quantum mechanics calculations to correlate imperfections and defects with material properties at the single-atom level. This research will be published Feb 2. in the journal Nature.

Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, led the international team in mapping the atomic-level details of the bimetallic nanoparticle, more than a trillion of which could fit within a grain of sand.

Continue reading “Coordinates of more than 23,000 atoms in technologically important material mapped” »

My friends at ORNL just announced they broke a record in the transmittal of information via Qubits this week. We’re getting closer for our QC networking and storage capabilities.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Feb. 1, 2017 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have set a new record in the transfer of information via superdense coding, a process by which the properties of particles like photons, protons and electrons are used to store as much information as possible.

The ORNL team transferred 1.67 bits per qubit, or quantum bit, over a fiber optic cable, edging out the previous record of 1.63 per qubit.

Continue reading “ORNL researchers break data transfer efficiency record” »

Interesting article; however, 2 things missing from it. 1) China has already implemented a QC wireless network and in phase 2 of their work on QC communications which is also involving a QC platform and hacking. 2) Author stated that Mosca believes by 2026 a nation state will have QC. I would suggest Mosca network a little more as China and Sydney are well ahead of schedule plus many of us involved in QC already are testing the scalability of QC on small devices and other platforms v. mammoth servers thanks to much of the new findings last year on proving the reliability and traceability of particles at various complex states of entanglement and information processing as well as the more recent findings of enabling the constant cold temperatures needed to support QC on small servers.

My own estimates is we’re within a 5 year window of being able to see a more pragmatic version of QC as servers and networking for the broader masses. I don’t believe we’re 10 years away or less than 5 years at the moment; however, things could change tomorrow to the point we see the timeline shortened from 5 to 3 years as I do have friends who believe we’re within 3 years.

Even though quantum computers don’t exist yet, security companies are preparing to protect against them.

Continue reading “Fear sells in the computer security business, and quantum computers could be very scary” »

Awesome! More news on the time crystals.

The source of time travel speculation lies in the fact that our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a “closed timelike curve,” or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time.

Continue reading “Physicists Simulate Sending Particles of Light Into the Past, Strengthening the Case that Time Travel Is Possible” »

Particle physics is an interesting and complicated field of study. Its theoretical framework, the Standard Model, was developed during the second half of the twentieth century and it opened he possibility to explaining the behavior of the basic blocks of the Universe. It also classified all the particles, from the electron (discovered in 1897) to the Higgs Boson (found in 2012). It is not pretentious to claim that it is one of the most successful theories in Science.

Unfortunately, the Standard Model is also a very difficult theory to handle. By using an analytic approach many problems cannot be solved and computational methods require a huge computational power. Most of the simulations about this theory are performed in supercomputers and they have severe limitations. For instance, the mass of the proton can be calculated by the use of a technique called Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (lattice QCD), but even using a supercomputer of the Blue Gene type the error was around 2% . This is a huge achievement that shows the utility of the theory, but it is also a signal about the necessity of developing new numerical tools to handle this kind of calculations.

One potential solution to this problem is to use quantum systems in order to perform the simulations. This idea is at the core of the field of quantum computing and it was first proposed by one of the pioneers in the study of particle physics, Richard Feynman . Feynman’s idea is easy to explain. Quantum systems are very difficult to simulate by the use of ordinary classical computers but by using quantum systems we can simulate different quantum systems. If we have a quantum system that we cannot control but we can mimic its dynamics to a friendly quantum system we have solved the problem. We can just manipulate the second system and infer the results to the first one.

Continue reading “Simulating particle physics in a quantum computer” »